August 24, 2010

Apple Wins Major Touch Technology Patent along with Patents for the Original iPod, iPod touch, Graphic Gradients, Shake & More

The US Patent and Trademark Office officially published a series of nine newly granted patents for Apple Inc. today. The notables within this group include design wins for both the original iPod and the iPod touch along with other patents covering Apple's now defunct Shake application, the technology behind multi-conic graphic gradients and most importantly, a major touch related patent that may have played a role in Apple's latest Magic Trackpad desktop device.

Granted Design Patents: Original iPod, iPod touch

Apple has been granted a design patents for the original iPod under D622,261 – and the iPod touch under D622,270. Apple's CEO Steve Jobs and Senior Vice President, Industrial Design, Jonathan Ive are credited for the designs along with selected members of Apple's specialty engineers.

Apple has been granted a major touch related patent covering an apparatus and methods for simultaneously tracking multiple finger and palm contacts as hands approach, touch, and slide across a proximity-sensing, multi-touch surface. Identification and classification of intuitive hand configurations and motions enables unprecedented integration of typing, resting, pointing, scrolling, 3D manipulation, and handwriting into a versatile, ergonomic computer input device. Apple's patent FIG. 1 shown below is a system block diagram of the entire, integrated manual input apparatus.

In part, one can deduce that Apple has used aspects of this patent to create their latest Magic Trackpad device. Whether Apple will eventually introduce a full virtual keyboard-centric device is unknown at this time.

The Four Key Claims of this Patent

1 - A method of processing touch inputs of touch devices that touchdown and liftoff on or near a touch sensitive surface, the surface including an associated plurality of touch sensors, the method comprising: reading data from the touch sensors to obtain positions of contacts corresponding to the touch devices on or near the surface wherein the data is read to enable simultaneous detection of multiple distinguishable contacts; tracking the contacts based on the positions; selecting an activity corresponding to an initial set of at least two of the contacts corresponding to at least two of the touch devices simultaneously on or near the surface, wherein the activity corresponds to one or more input events of a computing device; maintaining the selection of the activity when the number of contacts on or near the surface changes due to one or more touchdowns and liftoffs of touch devices, so long as at least one touch device remains touched down on or near the surface, wherein a second set includes a contact corresponding to each of the one or more remaining touch devices; determining a motion based on the tracking, wherein the motion is based on the initial set prior to the change in the number of contacts and is based on the second set after the change in the number of contacts; and based on the motion, generating at least one input event of the selected activity.

2 - A non-transitory computer readable storage medium having stored therein instructions, which when executed by a computing device with a touch surface, cause the computing device to perform a method of processing touch inputs of touch devices that touchdown and liftoff on or near the touch sensitive surface, the method comprising: reading data from the touch surface to obtain positions of contacts corresponding to the touch devices on or near the surface wherein the data is read to enable simultaneous detection of multiple distinguishable contacts; tracking the contacts based on the positions; selecting an activity corresponding to an initial set of at least two of the contacts corresponding to at least two of the touch devices simultaneously on or near the surface, wherein the activity corresponds to one or more input events of the computing device; maintaining the selection of the activity when the number of contacts on or near the surface changes due to one or more touchdowns and liftoffs of touch devices, so long as at least one touch device remains touched down on or near the surface, wherein a second set includes a contact corresponding to each of the one or more remaining touch devices; determining a motion based on the tracking, wherein the motion is based on the initial set prior to the change in the number of contacts and is based on the second set after the change in the number of contacts; and based on the motion, generating at least one input event of the selected activity.

3 - An apparatus including a touch sensitive surface with an associated plurality of touch sensors, the apparatus comprising: a sensor data reader that obtains position data of contacts corresponding to at least two touch devices on or near the surface wherein the data is read to enable simultaneous detection of multiple distinguishable contacts; a tracking module that tracks the contacts based on the position data; an activity selector that selects an activity corresponding to an initial set of at least two of the contacts corresponding to at least two of the touch devices simultaneously on or near the surface, wherein the activity corresponds to one or more input events, and maintains the selection of the activity when the number of contacts on or near the surface changes due to one or more touchdowns and liftoffs of touch devices, so long as at least one touch device remains touched down on or near the surface, wherein a second set includes a contact corresponding to each of the one or more remaining touch devices; a motion determiner that determines a motion based on the tracking, wherein the motion is based on the initial set prior to the change in the number of contacts and is based on the second set after the change in the number of contacts; and a touch event recognizer that generates, based on the motion, at least one input event of the selected activity.

4 - A computing system including a touch sensitive surface with an associated plurality of touch sensors, the system comprising: means for reading data from the touch sensors to obtain position data of contacts corresponding to at least two touch devices on or near the surface wherein the data is read to enable simultaneous detection of multiple distinguishable contacts; means for tracking contacts based on the position data; means for selecting an activity corresponding to an initial set of at least two of the contacts corresponding to at least two of the touch devices simultaneously on or near the touch surface, wherein the activity corresponds to one or more input events, and maintaining the selection of the activity when the number of contacts on or near the surface changes due to one or more touchdowns and liftoffs of touch devices, so long as at least one touch device remains touched down on or near the surface, wherein a second set includes a contact corresponding to each of the one or more remaining touch devices; means for determining a motion based on the tracking, wherein the motion is based on the initial set prior to the change in the number of contacts and is based on the second set after the change in the number of contacts; and means for generating, based on the motion, at least one input event of the selected activity.

Apple has been granted a patent for their application known as Shake, a discontinued image compositing package that was used in the post-production industry. Shake was widely used in visual effects and digital compositing for film, HD and commercials. It enabled complex image processing sequences to be designed through the connection of effects "nodes" in a graphical workflow interface. Some of Shake has supposedly been folded into Apple's Final Cut Pro application.

Apple's granted patent covers a technique for computing a complex gradient using multiple conics. In connection with a computer system having a graphics processing unit (GPU) in addition to the normal central processing unit (CPU), gradients can be computed in real time. The conics may be rendered and adjusted in a number of ways, providing a rich palette for creation of gradient graphics. The computational efficiency of the algorithms disclosed herein, when executed on typical GPU hardware, allows rendering frame rates high enough to provide animated gradient images.

Notice: Patently Apple presents only a brief summary of patents with associated graphic(s) for journalistic news purposes as each such patent application and/or Granted Patent is revealed by the U.S. Patent & Trade Office. Readers are cautioned that the full text of any patent application and/or Issued Patent should be read in its entirety for further details. For additional information on any granted patent noted above that is not directly linked, simply feed the individual patent number(s) provided, minus the "GP" suffix (if present) into thissearch engine.About Comments:Patently Apple reserves the right to post, dismiss or edit comments.

Comments

I see the Graphics Gradient using OpenCL has a familiar face to me in it. Frank Brunner was the co-creator of TIFFany 3.x and co-founder, along with Stan Jirman, of CaffeineSoft Inc.

I'll never forget during the merger at WWDC '97 when Stan and Ralf were demoing TIFFany 3 [I was there as an engineer for Apple] and Adobe engineers were writing down everything they saw and wanted to copy for Photoshop.